For organizer and author Paul Engler, the grassroots uprising that greeted the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 was a formative learning experience, even though he wasn’t physically present. He was fascinated by the coalitions between environmental groups and the labor movement and the diversity of tactics which shut the city down. For Generation X, the 1999 Seattle shutdown was like the Baby Boomer’s 1968 Democratic National Convention protests; it was a definitive generational event. Paul and his brother Mark developed a set of organizing precepts from their study of the Seattle uprising and earlier social movements. They came to the conclusion that multiple strategies for social change are necessary for a movement to succeed, and used the term “movement ecology” to describe this process.  Read more

Ellen Siegel was working in the hospital in Sabra during the massacre. Initially, many people in the camps ran to the hospital seeking safety and shelter, injured with bullet wounds. As the violence spread and panic broke out, most of the patients inside the hospital fled, leaving behind only “the critically ill who couldn’t move.” The hospital staff hid them in the basement. Siegel recalls taping up the windows so explosions wouldn’t shatter the glass. The next morning, the volunteer international staff were told to go to the ground floor of the hospital. Militants, who Siegel recognized as Phalange from the Arabic on their uniforms, were waiting for them. When an Arab staff member of the hospital attempted to join the group of mostly Northern European, white volunteers, the soldiers shot and killed him.